Seville is touted as the perfect weekend city retreat - a short hop from the UK where sun is guaranteed, there's too much to see and the nightlife is wilder than the Serengeti plains.

But what happens when you spend more than a weekend - five weeks to be exact - in a city that doesn't sleep? And what if you're with child, a 10-month-old more accustomed to Soft Play off Holloway Road and bed by seven than tapas and rioja until dawn? And what if you can't speak even a chorizo of Spanish?

Our initial idea was to spend a sabbatical doing something vaguely stimulating - ideally, we wanted to learn a language whilst at the same time relaxing in a foreign country.

After much head-scratching we landed on Seville. It was a city we had been to two years earlier, and we thought it had an unfussy feeling about it. Some buildings were crumbling gently with the years, and although restoration of many areas was in full swing, the city still had a charming, lazy feel to it. It was also searingly hot in summer, so much so that even locals skipped between the shadows of buildings to escape the power of the sun.

But that was August, and our plan this time was to take five weeks over March and April. All we had to do was book flights, find accommodation, enrol in a language school and entertain ourselves for five weeks.

After a few weeks of trawling the internet it all came together: flights, hire car and a two-bedroom house right in the middle of the Barrio Santa Cruz, Seville's beating heart where - if you believe the stories - Don Juan romanced his ladies, Murillo and Velazquez doodled and where the city's various conquerors built some of the most stunning gardens and edifices in Europe. I had also found a small language school minutes from our new home.

Arriving in the cobbled road Ximenez de Enciso for the first time, the house looked pretty much like it said on the web: a thin, four-storey terraced home with a roof terrace with views of Seville's magnificent cathedral tower, La Giralda, two bedrooms, two bathrooms a kitchen and a lounge. What the web didn't give us, we would later discover, was the extra dimension of sound. We had asked through email correspondence for a quiet street, well aware that our 10-month-old, Sam, would rouse himself at the slightest excuse. We were determined to establish library-like calm over our home.

But Ximenez de Enciso 13 happened to be sandwiched between three of Seville's most celebrated tapas bars, all three in the guidebooks for tourists to trial round, all three within touching distance of our front balcony.

As Sevillianos rarely think about going out before 10pm and often retire well after 2am, the location initially seemed quite tricky. Indeed, there were nights when it sounded if we were in the audience of a grand theatre during the interval, with everyone breaking loudly into conversation after the silence of the main act. Yet despite the nightly party on our doorstep, by some miracle our young one slept through - 11 hours a night, every night.

Our dismay at the noisy location turned into something of an advantage. Come 9pm and with him fast asleep we would leave the house, take two steps outside and join the well-dressed throng at Las Teresas, one of the finest bars in the city's centre where the bushy-moustached waiter would serve us chilled manzanilla, spinach with chickpeas, gambas in garlic and tortilla. The baby monitor, listening out for Sam who was 30ft above us would occasionally alert us to his rustling and the odd bottom activity but rarely a cry. And retiring at a very English 11 o'clock, the air-conditioning and earplugs helped block out the sounds of the street.

It didn't take long to settle in to our new lives. Mornings for me were spent at Linc - the language school nine minutes' walk through cobbled streets from home - where I began a four-week course in Spanish for beginners.

I had chosen this small school tucked away in a side road off the main shopping street, Calle Sierpes, simply because it seemed to have a good feel about it. Its classes were small in size and the school as a whole had less than 100 students. While I tried to learn, my partner entertained parents and friends who popped over to visit and sought out some of the city's celebrated sights.

We soon came to realise we were living in a city stuffed full of history with a population intent on having and good time.

It is also a place where we felt incredibly safe. Crime didn't seem to happen - at least not to us. The nearest thing I experienced to a felony was when a little old lady came up to me and, in perfectly clipped English from another era, told me how she had that very morning gotten off the train from Verona, to find the friends she was expected to meet were nowhere to be found. Now she had nowhere to stay, and no money to buy something to eat.

"But I saw you here yesterday morning," I said. "Ah yes," she replied. "Goodbye," she then sighed, floating away on a pair of legs made invisible by her long skirt. I saw her on and off over the next few weeks but she never approached me again.

Another striking change from the UK was the way our child was treated. You always hear how much the Spanish love children, but it is somewhat shocking to see your child become public property. Waiters scoop them into their hands and parade them round their restaurant, shopkeepers dig into glass jars and hand over inappropriate sweets to babies, and elderly folk in the street berate you for not covering your son up with a woolly or tut-tut when he's wrapped up too warm.

Yet, strangely, for a city where children are so welcome, the facilities are absolutely nil. Streets are peppered with kids' clothing stores, but in restaurants there are no high chairs or changing areas. It is just one of the city's many contradictions.

Seville is a place where religion is taken extremely seriously, where children are still dressed to the nines for Sunday church, and car stereos can be heard booming out choral mass rather than rock and roll. But it is also a place stuffed full of bars that remain open well into the early hours and where TV channels advertise the semi-nude services of pornographic chatlines.

It is also a place busy to the brim, where trade and business is taken seriously but which also closes down for three hours a day for the siesta that remains part of Spanish life. It's a place for the adventurer, with something new around every corner.

Way to goRyanair has flights from London Stansted to Seville starting at £52.40 return including taxes. Check Skyscanner.net for the best deal.

Where to stay David Munk found his apartment through www.sol.com. If you want to stay in a hotel, the five-star Melia Colon is a centrally located and grand residence. Las Casas de Los Mercaderes is a three-star boutique hotel in the centre of the city.

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Life swap

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 14.29 EST on Thursday 16 March 2006.
It was last modified at 14.29 EDT on Monday 2 October 2006.
It was first published at 19.00 EST on Tuesday 21 November 2006.